BASIC is 50 years old!

[Don Shepherd]

(04-14-2014 09:03 PM)Alvaro Wrote:  BASIC is surely a good Programing language, specialy if you need to do a "quick" simple task.
But complete and powerful enough to full fill the most needs of end-users.
I am questioning myself why we don´t have it in every programable device today? Why is BASIC nearly gone.
Instead, seems that "everyone" around did cook their own soup at their flavour.
But at the end, people are facing , here and there, the one way or the other, with difficulties and this do indeed prevents end-user to work.
With BASIC around, the life of people would be much more easier and , younger people would have a good start up in Computer Programing World.

When BASIC was invented, there were no graphical user interfaces, pointing devices, and event-driven programming, so a simple clean language for learning a little about programming was possible. BASIC was not originally intended as a production programming language, but Microsoft based its Visual BASIC on that model, with many enhancements and extensions of course. When I was a professional programmer, I used FORTRAN and COBOL exclusively on mainframes (Univac and DEC), and those programming languages were fine. But for just "playing around", I still appreciate BASIC's simplicity.